Hello! Welcome to this week’s edition of The Connected Church News, where we bring you the Top 5 Digital and Social Media News each week for Leaders of Nonprofits, Churches, Ministries and Faith-driven Entrepreneurs.

We know you are busy. And we know that most of you don’t have the time to search the big world wide web for the current news that is relevant to you.

That is why each week we bring you the Top 5 Digital and Social Media News that you need to know for this week and present it to you in a short video format.

This week we look at news items related to LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram

📰 Top 5 Digital & Social Media News

Our first big news is from Instagram. Last week, Instagram announced that you can now save your ‘Instagram Live’ sessions to your IGTV channel, right after you finish your Live session. This can save a lot of time if you are a regular user of Instagram Live, because I know many ministries do a Live session and then they have to download it, and then they have to re-upload it to IGTV, and to other places.

This will save time because you can directly save it to IGTV. This not only saves time, but it also opens up new workflows – while saving to IGTV, you can select your ‘Preview’ option and save that footage on your newsfeed. It can appear on your IG newsfeed. And of course, it can also appear on your IG Stories directly. So from one content, you can now have your presence on all of the other areas of Instagram.

I highly recommend you check out this new feature if you plan to use Instagram in the days to come (which you should, considering Instagram is one of the fastest growing channels out there in the social media space).

Our next news is from Facebook. Last week, Facebook announced that they are expanding their Brand Safety Controls, which gives advertisers better control over where their ads appear within in-stream placements. There are different placement options within Facebook. And one of them is in-stream placements. This announcement is about giving better control for that particular type of placement.

Now Facebook gives you control like you can ‘white list publishers’, ‘content white list’ and you can ‘exclude live streams’, etc. All of these options and tools are available, in the ‘Brand Safety Control Interface’, which you can find in business manager. There’s also an overview page which will show all your ad accounts and the status of their brand safety controls. Each ad account’s status is also displayed in that page.

🗞️ News #3 – LinkedIn launches its own new native ‘Polls’ option

Our next news is from LinkedIn. LinkedIn has now officially released its own native ‘Polls’ option. Polls are a very good way of collecting feedback from your social media audience, and it’s also a great tool to increase engagement in your channel. So, if you are a nonprofit or a ministry that uses polls regularly on other channels and if your audience are also on LinkedIn, then this might be a tool that you definitely want to check out. Because it’s one thing to have polls in other channels like Instagram and Facebook, but it’s a whole new thing when it happens on LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is a professional platform, and the audience who are going to respond to your poll are people who actually work in that space.

LinkedIn people are of a very different profile than what you would find, they are people with a different mindset than what you would find in other channels. Do check this out. I think it’s a great way for you to increase engagement and also get valuable feedback from your audience.

Our next news is about TikTok. We have two news items about TikTok this week. One is the release of a Youth Portal, which is a space where TikTok wants to educate teens and their parents about internet safety, and also the tools and controls that they have within TikTok.

If you are in a ministry that ministers to teens or kids in that age group, then this is something you might want to check out from a digital ministry perspective. The other big news is: Disney’s Streaming Head, Kevin Mayer has joined TikTok as the new CEO! He has quit Disney and he is joining TikTok. He is also going to be the COO of the parent company, ByteDance. What I wanted to share with you is a quote, an interesting quote that he has given, which says, “I was happy with my job at Disney… the magnitude of this opportunity was just something I couldn’t pass up”.

Now, you know what is happening with TikTok and all the buzz and the action around it, especially during this COVID season. So if you’re a ministry that has not yet tried out TikTok, or if you are still on the wall, then it is time to check it out.

🗞️ News #5 – Twitter releases ‘Retweets with Comments’ section on iOS

Our final news of this week is from Twitter. Last week, Twitter officially released a new feature in which it lists ‘Retweets with comments’ separately. This is a very interesting, useful feature where now below your tweet, you will see a total retweet count, and then you click on that, you will see a separate space where ‘Retweet with comments’ and ‘Retweet’ without comment, the basic retweet, is listed. This can be really useful because it’s one thing to retweet your tweet, but it’s another thing to retweet and comment about it.

And you as a person who has put out that content would like to know who has commented on it, what have they commented, and you might want to engage with them because they are the people who are really talking about your content. So this might be a very useful feature and I highly recommend you check it out if you use Twitter.

That’s all we have for you this week. Thank you for spending your time with us.

Have a wonderful week!

Do leave your comments, questions, feedback, and reviews. You can also email me: podcast@natchilazarus.com

We will bring you a fresh set of the latest Social Media news for you next week.

Author of The Connected Church. Social Media and Digital Marketing Consultant for Nonprofits, Faith-based Organisations, Churches and Ministries. You can subscribe to Natchi’s email newsletter by clicking here.